Another year, another Debconf and now it is passed. Pictures are processes and all are now uploaded. We are still missing 25 names in the Debconf 11 group photo. With 265 people and 86 Mpix it is the highest resolution image we have had so far (Spain image had a bit more pixels, but a lot of them were outside the actual photo) and the largest number of people (Edinburgh photo had 248 people). The video team produced hundreds of gigabytes of footage, we had very interesting talks and debates and sometimes the AdHoc meeting room on the side was overcrowded with people in BoFs that were not on the initial schedule. It has been a very special kind of conference. As it always is. :)As always, there were also some problems. I did not read the debconf-team mailing list, but I hear there was plenty of 'fun' discussions to be had in the run-up to the event, some information on getting to the venue was not quite clear (that was quickly fixed as first people arriving to Debcamp were documenting their experience), the organizational dance with the food tickets was more ... elaborate than usually, both the day trip and the formal dinner were ... more self-driven than expected, vegetarian complaint level was about the same as usual (which is considered high by some) and the wireless in the hotel was very weak, also Saturday weddings are quite loud and run very late apparently.To compensate for that we had: very sunny Debcamp, cheap beer (!!!), great quality accommodations, very good looking venue, good network at the venue (after initial scalability issues with the wireless), good food (that did sometimes run out, though), short distances to all locations, oh and did I mention cheep beer?

This is just a quick note that I broke down and replaced my ageing iPhone 3G with a brand new unlocked Google Nexus S. I got it in my hands last Saturday and by the end of the first day it did 90% of what I used my iPhone for and by the end of day two it did 100% of what I used my phone for before this and did it better than the iPhone. I will give it a week and then write up a bigger thing on all the good and bad things I notices from my migration from iPhone to Nexus S.

I have just looked at traffic to my photos from Debconf10 during and after the event. During the event I sent out the link to the photos to Twitter/Identi.ca and to IRC channel of the conference. The amount of people visiting my photos rose from <100 per day to around 1000 per day. That might be the number of people that follow Debian actively enough to either follow the conference directly or look at #debian or #debconf or #debconf10 Twitter hashtags (if only half of people care about photos, multiply that number by 2).Now right after I posted the group photo to my blog and to Debian Planet on the 7th of August, the number of daily views sharply rose to 10 000 per day and stayed at that number for 3 days, then decayed to 5k, 3k, 2k, 1k.

Currently I own and use an iPhone 3G. I bought it almost two years ago, when the local phone provider LMT started offering the iPhone legally. I had a pretty good experience with it most of the time, but now it is showing its age:

The two year warranty will run out in September

The iOS 4 update left out most of the new features - my model cann't have multitasking or backgrounds or any of that new cool stuff that is exclusive to the new iPhone 4

The hardware itself is starting to wear - the speaker stopped working a few weeks ago (so I have to use the loudspeaker function or headphones) and also approximately around that time the phone stated to randomly lock up approximately one a week or two - it freezes and after a few minutes reboots and demads to be connected to iTunes and restored from backup

A scandal has been brewing in Latvia over the last half year and yesterday the activity spiked shocking the media and some IT people in the country. I'll go back and explain what happened first, what is happening now and why this could have a heavy impact on IT and journalists in Latvia.